Steve Skroce has spent decades drawing superheroes, mutants, magic, monsters, and some of the biggest action sequences ever put to film. With Tales of Wonder, his new Skybound and Image Comics limited series, he’s turning his attention toward the people actually responsible for creating those larger-than-life worlds.
Featuring colorist Ian Herring and letter Pat Brosseau, Tales of Wonder follows Stu and Jake, two World War II veterans who turned an extraordinary wartime encounter into Wonder Comics, a publishing empire built around superheroes they claimed as their own creations. Success eventually shattered their friendship, and decades later, the two are brought back together as Hollywood prepares to launch the America’s Freedom Force cinematic universe.
Then the superheroes show up for real.
It’s a premise Skroce has been carrying around for years, inspired in part by movies about creators suddenly finding themselves inside the kinds of adventures they once imagined.
“I would say I have the holy trinity of movies that influenced this book,” Skroce told me over Zoom last week. “Three Amigos, Tropic Thunder, and, of course, Galaxy Quest. The stories that are about makers of adventure stories going on their own adventure story that’s similar to the kind that they make-believe, the kind that they tell. I just always loved that premise and that little subgenre.”
Comics seemed especially suited to the idea. Skroce imagined aging creators sitting at a modern convention when the characters they spent their lives writing and drawing suddenly appeared before them.
“I just thought comics was so ripe for it,” Skroce said. “It was just an idea that just kept popping into my head, like how much fun it would be to have a couple old-timey creators and then, like, at a modern Comic-Con, the actual heroes their characters are based on show up. And then it sort of just grows from there.”
A Fractured Friendship
Stu and Jake will inevitably invite comparisons to some of the famous creative partnerships in comics history, particularly Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Skroce isn’t hiding from those associations, but he also isn’t attempting to fictionalize any one famous falling out.
“The characters are fictional and not based on real people,” Skroce said. “It’s not literally Stan and Jack. You can tell. I mean, that’s on purpose. I’m not trying to really comment on their story so much, but all creative mediums, pretty much all business, have legendary falling-out stories. With comics, our most famous one is those two guys.”
The more personal inspiration came from Skroce’s own career. Years ago, he shared an idea for a project with another creator he considered a friend, a move he’s since come to regret entirely.
“This guy just pinched that idea, and then a week later, he’s got the same premise, same title, and my jaw was on the floor,” Skroce said. “It pretty much ended the friendship.”
However, time has changed the way Skroce views what happened. The loss of the friendship, and the anger that welled inside him, ultimately stuck with him more than the creative dispute itself.
“You have friends in the creative businesses. You have friends that you can bounce things off of, talk about your work, share on that level, and once what happened [had] happened, we couldn’t really do that anymore,” Skroce said. “It’s not so much I want to reconcile with this particular person, but it was like there was a loss there.”
The anger lingered, too, and Skroce now considers his reaction one of his biggest regrets surrounding the entire incident.
“The story comes out of…let’s call it trauma or bad experience, whatever, and just the idea of wanting to give a friendship a second chance was something on my mind,” Skroce said. “It was a cathartic idea for me.”
That experience grounds Tales of Wonder in an essential way beneath all that superhero spectacle.
“The emotional core of the story is these two guys reconciling,” Skroce said. “It’s not like the whole book is these two having a therapy session at all, but it’s structured around those moments, and they both get to plead their case and grind some axes, but all in a way that I’m trying to make fun and humorous [and] satirical.”
Welcome to The Modern Comic Convention
Skroce has plenty to play with onceTales of Wonder reaches the modern comics industry.
“When I started out, everyone would take an old piece of cardboard and write their name on it and put it down,” Skroce said. “Now we got the art dealers, we got the sketch covers, we’ve got all the different kinds of signatures you can get. On and on and on. It’s like the banking system or something in there.”
That commercialization is baked into the series. Wonder Comics has become a cultural juggernaut, and America’s Freedom Force is now valuable enough to support its own cinematic universe. Skroce takes the idea to an absurd extreme once the supernatural threat begins affecting humanity.
The salvation of comic book fans may ultimately come from the most stereotypical collector behavior imaginable. The villain’s plan involves transforming people into black, oily monsters controlled by other-dimensional creatures. Fortunately, the creatures have a weakness to a chemical found in plastic.
“Because so many comic fans are constantly handling their Mylar bags, they’ve absorbed all this,” Skroce said. “They’re immune.”
That leaves Artist Alley, relegated to the back of the convention center near the boiler room, positioned to become humanity’s last stand. Bagged and boarded comics suddenly have a considerably more practical use than maintaining a 9.8.
When Superheroes Become Reality
There’s another layer to the joke. When America’s Freedom Force initially appears at the convention, nobody believes they’re actually superheroes. Most attendees assume they’re watching an elaborate marketing stunt.
Added Skroce, “While there’s a life-and-death battle going on in front of them, people are still just queued up and looking at their comics and watching and just giving real-time reviews of whatever they’re watching.”
Even seeing the characters standing in front of them isn’t quite enough. Fans critique how accurately the heroes resemble their movie counterparts and marvel at the quality of the supposed promotion. Eventually, though, fantasy becomes impossible to deny.
“If you were in some sort of crisis and your life was on the line, and then the real f**king Avengers turned up, you’d be like, ‘Holy shit,’” Skroce said. “It would be a religious experience, I think.”
For Skroce, that reaction gets at something deeper about the relationship people develop with fictional characters.
“They all just gather around and understand that they’re saved,” Skroce said. “Because they knew these people would save them because they’ve learned that since they were little kids.”
Once again, GalaxyQuest became an important reference point. Skroce singled out Alan Rickman’s character of Alexander Dane, an actor who resents the catchphrase attached to his television character until he repeats it to comfort a dying alien who genuinely believes in him.
“He got to do that with this corny thing that he resented for decades,” Skroce said. “I like that idea, and so there’s a lot of that in there.”
A Decade on, and Post-it Notes Remain
When I last spoke with Skroce (about Maestros in 2017), he described a writing and drawing process involving sketchbooks increasingly covered with Post-it notes as ideas changed. Nine years later, little has changed.
“I’ll start writing and then just revise and keep adding and adding until I get to a version I like,” Skroce said. “I’m still revising up until the moment I draw the panel. Lots of stuff happens right on the day. You just throw it in.”
Sometimes an idea sitting on the periphery expands naturally as he gets closer to drawing the page. Other times, Skroce reaches the end of that creative path and discovers there’s nothing waiting for him.
Skroce added, “You get to a clearing at the end of the path, there’s nothing there.”
Fortunately, there’s always another
“That mortgage bill is coming,” Skroce said. “So that’s the real motivator.”
Writing and drawing the same comic creates another problem. Skroce the writer occasionally makes life miserable for Skroce the artist.
“The writer and the artist battles happen on the page,” Skroce said. “I’ll be too verbose with myself, and then I’ll have not left enough space for those balloons or caption boxes.”
That tendency recently saw editor Ben Abernathy tell Skroce that a page was simply too wordy.
“I was like, ‘Oh, you’re totally right,’ and I cut it down by half,” Skroce said. “Prior to that, I was pretty happy with it because I’d spent all this time writing. So I was like, ‘This is good.’ But yeah, I try to be open. I try not to get too hung up on stuff. You’ve got to sacrifice your children a lot.”
A True Celebration of Comics
For all the satire aimed at conventions, cinematic universes, commercialization, creator egos, and fandom, Skroce isn’t approaching Tales of Wonder from a place of cynicism.
“I wanted to have some fun with the whole division,” Skroce said. “I feel like that’s everywhere right now, where we’re measuring each other up by our differences.”
Of course, comics fandom certainly isn’t immune to that tendency.
“When I look at the comics community, I want to think that they’ve got more in common than reasons to be separate,” Skroce said. “Maybe it’s goofy moralizing, but who cares? I like it.”
That might ultimately be the most revealing way to look at Tales of Wonder. Skroce has taken a painful experience from his own creative life and filtered it through superheroes, comic conventions, Hollywood franchises, monsters, Mylar bags, and decades of comics history.
At the center of it all are two old friends, with one more opportunity to figure out what went wrong. And this time, they’ll even get to save the world while they’re at it.
Tales of Wonder #1drops this week (September 2) from Skybound and Image Comics.
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